I had to look up Kent Hovind, but it appears so. When politicians start pontificating on scientific matters it’s obvious that they have a vested interest in the findings. We’ve just had the hottest year on record and devastating bush fires very early in the season. This could be the start of things to come. Maybe not, but it’s unwise to rule out the possibility.

I had to look up Kent Hovind, but it appears so. When politicians start pontificating on scientific matters it’s obvious that they have a vested interest in the findings.

The Hovinds are known for teaching their “expertise” on “creationist science”!

If you are interested,…

What a great clip! Eric certainly got himself into a tangle using the same old tricks of analogy and simplistic argument. I think people like that aim for a wise, homespun sort of credibility. Fortunately it doesn’t always pay off, especially when trying to argue with a savvy eleven year old.

When I made my comment about politicians talking about science for their own political ends, I meant in cases when they refute the science for their own political ends. As written, my comment could easily be used against the other side as well.

He’s the lying, little prick who kept Australia in the 20th century by taking advantage of an Australian voting public who don’t have a critical thought in their heads, and would prefer to venerate cricket and football rather than thinking of any sort.

UK universities urged to pull cash from fossil fuel giants

An international campaign to urge large institutions to dump fossil fuel investments reaches the UK this week, following rapid success in the US.

The year-old divestment campaign, Fossil Free, has grown even faster than similar efforts that once targeted apartheid, tobacco and arms manufacturers. It now aims to focus attention on the £5bn invested in coal, oil and gas by the endowment funds of UK universities. The move comes as financial giants such as HSBC, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs are starting to take seriously the prospect that global action to reduce carbon emissions could leave two-thirds of the world’s proven fossil fuel reserves unburnable and worthless.

“The divestment campaign will start politically to bankrupt the fossil fuel industry and throw into stronger relief that it is a rogue industry, committed to burning more carbon than any government on Earth thinks it would be safe to burn,” said Bill McKibben, a prominent US climate campaigner and figurehead of the Fossil Free campaign. “One reason we are losing the battle against climate change – the most important challenge humans have faced – is the power of the fossil fuel industry to block change,” he told the Observer. “It is the richest industry in the history of human enterprise.”

The US campaign has already led to more than 40 institutions, including the city of Seattle, universities and churches, pulling out of fossil fuel investments. Addressing the political debate in the UK over rising energy bills, McKibben said: “England has been burning fossil fuels since James Watt: there is no way you get to transition [to low-carbon energy] for free. But as economist Lord Nicholas Stern has said over and over again, the cost of not doing it is orders of magnitude higher than doing it.”

Student divestment campaigns have sprung up at 20 UK universities, including the three with the largest investments: Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. UK universities have more than £5bn – £2,000 per student – invested in fossil fuels, according to student group People & Planet and the 350.org campaign, which McKibben co-founded.

“Investing in fossil fuel companies, which harm communities and destroy the climate, is not OK,” said Miriam Dobson, from People & Planet at Edinburgh University, where the campaign tour begins on Wednesday before visiting Birmingham and London.

British campaigners claimed a first victory last week, with the University of Surrey shifting funds from two unnamed fossil fuel companies into a renewable-energy-focused company.

The report also lists the research funding that companies, including Shell and BP, give universities, including £6m to Oxford and £17m to Imperial College London. “UK universities have become victims of corporate capture,” said Kevin Smith from oil and gas watchdog Platform. “We are allowing public infrastructure to be used to subsidise a dangerous, outdated energy model.”

A separate report found that the fossil fuel divestment campaign is growing faster than any previous one. “Stigmatisation poses a far-reaching threat to fossil fuel companies,” said Ben Caldecott, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and an author of the report. “In every case we reviewed, divestment campaigns were successful in lobbying for restrictive legislation.”

The divestment campaign argues that there is also a financial reason for getting rid of fossil fuel investments, because increasing policies to cut carbon will eventually impact on the stocks’ value. The landmark climate change report in September, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, stated that agreement by the world’s governments to restrict global warming to less than 2C meant keeping total future carbon emissions under 500 gigatonnes. Analysis by the International Energy Agency and the Carbon Tracker thinktank has shown this would mean that about two-thirds of the coal, oil and gas on the books of fossil fuel companies would have to remain unburned.

Carbon capture and storage technology would, if developed successfully, bury emissions equivalent to just 4% of total global reserves, according to Carbon Tracker.

With the 200 biggest fossil fuel companies spending $674bn in 2012 on finding new reserves (compared to $281bn renewable energy investment), the risk of inflating a stock market “carbon bubble” to the tune of trillions of dollars is “very big indeed”, according to Stern. “The financial crisis has shown what happens when risks accumulate unnoticed,” he said in April.

On Thursday, a group of 70 global investors with $3 trillion of collective assets launched the first coordinated effort to demand that the world’s 40 leading fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil andf BHP Billiton, assess the financial risks a carbon bubble poses to their businesses.

“Companies must plan properly for the risk of falling demand to minimise the risk our clients’ capital is wasted,” said Craig Mackenzie, at Scottish Widows Investment Partnership, one of Europe’s largest asset management companies. Storebrand, a $76bn Norwegian pension fund, divested from 19 fossil fuel companies in July, saying that the stocks would be “worthless financially” in the future.

While stock markets, including London which is heavily exposed to coal, have yet to significantly adjust company valuations, big financial players have started analysing the issue with reports in the last six months on the future risks of coal investments from Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Citi Commodities, while Morgan Stanley and Citi GPS have examined the wider energy market.

If some tool of an activist ever called me a “warmist”, I have no idea what I would do.

If you look at earlier discussions you will see me respond by asking them if they are simply too, lazy, ignorant, and scientifically illiterate to read the wealth of information in thousands of scientific reports, or if they are just stooging for the carbon industries?

There is no point (especially in front of an audience) in pandering to ignorant stooges or liars. Tell it like it is and call them out!

@link – John Howard told the launch the progressive left had a “grip” on education.

It is very obvious, that in his school days he had no grip whatever on learning science!

If some tool of an activist ever called a “denier” I’d hear some faith head yelling “BLASPHEMER” in my face.

Do you get it?

Yep! Spoken like a TRRrrrrooooo denier! (You really should start studying some science! – or at least learning SOMETHING from these discussi…
Let’s start with some chemistry; C + O2 = CO2 – billions of tons of it.

Oh right. That’s why the earth is experiencing unprecedented human caused global warming…. Oh wait. It isn’t.
Maybe the computer models on which the religion of Catastrophic Human Caused Global Warming is based aren’t actually that accurate. Or is that blasphemy?
I prefer asking questions to accepting anybody’s word for anything, but that’s just me. True believers get red in the face when confronted with the unbeliever.

That should be kept distinct from, “I’m an unbeliever, and you should be too.” which requires some evidence.

Got evidence?

Eh?

I’m not asking you to be an unbeliever. You believe or not believe whatever the hell you want, based on whatever evidence is good enough or not good enough for you. You’re sounding a bit like my fundamentalist christian brother who thinks Noah’s Ark is a true story, and asks me for evidence it isn’t.

I prefer asking questions to accepting anybody’s word for anything, but that’s just me.

No you don’t! You just keep on making up silly assertions illustrating your ignorance, and unwillingness to study evidence which was provided in earlier discussions!

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus.htm – A follow-up study by the Skeptical Science team of over 12,000 peer-reviewed abstracts on the subjects of ‘global warming’ and ‘global climate change’ published between 1991 and 2011 found that of the papers taking a position on the cause of global warming, over 97% agreed that humans are causing it (Cook 2013). The scientific authors of the papers were also contacted and asked to rate their own papers, and again over 97% whose papers took a position on the cause said humans are causing global warming.

Still – Like a true denialist, as in earlier discussions, you deny being in denial, while you have NOTHING to say by way of an explanation @16 for the greenhouse effects of the billions of tons of CO2 being added to the atmosphere which I have just pointed out to you and linked @15.

Ha! ha! ha! 12,000 peer reviewed studies is not enough for a purveyor of asserted ignorance, refusing to show a scrap of evidence for his personal claims which look like they were copied from media or internet scientific illiterates!

@OP link – Professor Plimer launched the book, a follow up to his book Heaven and Earth, at the Sydney Mining Club

Let me guess! Would that be an unbiased presentation to an audience looking for a balanced view or a propagandist being promoted by the mutual vested interests of the carbon industries?

Another attendee said: “He’s got a sensible attitude to the science. And he’s a well known geologist and as he says geology isn’t welcomed in the science debate.”

Guess what? Geologists with no understanding of climatology, who make a living investigating coal and oil reserves for carbon producers to exploit, don’t want to be out of a job!
No surprises that such people make up most of the 3% of climate denial scientists, who distance themselves from the 97% consensus who accept that carbon driven climate change is man-made!

Funny that the gullible or prejudiced, lap up lying statements like “he says geology isn’t welcomed in the science debate”, when it is the geologists who provided the seabed sediment cores confirming the glaciologists ice-core data of the climate record!

@OP link – Professor Plimer launched the book, a follow up to his book Heaven and Earth, at the Sydney Mining Club

Guess what? Geologists with no understanding of climatology, who make a living investigating coal and oil reserves for carbon producers to exploit, don’t want to be out of a job!

Yeah sorry about that, another toxic Australian export (along with our ever expanding coal exports, Ken Ham, Ruppert Murdock – you’re welcome!) Ian Plimer was actually a genuine skeptic at one point having written a book demolishing Noah’s Ark. I was very disappointed when he sided with the climate denial brigade. There were so many factual errors in his book on climate denial the one that springs to mind is that the Sun is currently fusing iron. He was rightly called to account by many experts in many fields of science for the multitude of mistakes he made and then had the hide to blame his researchers and the guy calls himself a scientist. It would appear he is now targeting a less skeptical audience.

He’s a conservative, and the people agreeing with him are people who might vote conservative. That makes them, whatever their talents or personality, bad human beings likely willing to see the world burn to a cinder so long as they can pretend they are both never really wrong and not really uncomfortable.

Global warming is the new evolution, save it might destroy everything admirable about human civilization – which might be the aim of people like Howard, somewhere deep in their guilt, since a return to feudalism, with its fixed classes, brutality and ignorance is what they are stupid enough to think they desire.

He’s a conservative, and the people agreeing with him are people who might vote conservative. That makes them, whatever their talents or personality, bad human beings likely willing to see the world burn to a cinder so long as they can pretend they are both never really wrong and not really uncomfo…

That’s it in a nutshell. These politicians don’t care what happens to future generations as long as it doesn’t stand in the way of their ability to make money. They know that their offspring and grandchildren will be able to afford to move to places unaffected by climate change and they don’t care about the impoverished masses drowning or starving in less hospitable climes. Gosh! We could afford to move to more agreeable areas if it came to it. We don’t want to see the worst happen to other people nonetheless.

Flamenco- do yourself and the planet a favor by trying a couple of courses on the subject. Look up Corsera.org or EdX- they offer free university courses on most any subject you can think of, including Climate Change, and it’s FREE. It will allow you to separate the science from the pseudo.

I’ve completed one from Harvard and am in one now from University of Chicago. Once you get the science, the rest will come easily. That there is global warming and that it is mostly man-made will become as plain as the nose you’ve cut off to spite your face.

Flamenco- do yourself and the planet a favor by trying a couple of courses on the subject. Look up Corsera.org or EdX- they offer free university courses on most any subject you can think of, including Climate Change, and it’s FREE. It will allow you to separate the science from the pseudo.

Excellent advice, but history suggests it will be wasted and we will continue to have denial drivel about the international consensus, copied from muppet websites, as we have had in previous years!https://old.richarddawkins.net/comments/578276

Yeah I remember some of the things he did…….Like America he refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol…and encouraged continued Logging in Tasmania’s pristine Gondwanaland rainforest with the go ahead for a paper pulp industry….and he refused to apologise to Aboriginal Australians over the lost generations…His book should have been titled…..How to get expelled from government…..

Howard will actually do more harm to earth than Hitler. Howard will kill billions, and make life impossible for generations to come. He will also drive species extinct. What is his motive? Just increasing profit for oil companies for a few years? May his name be cursed as long as there in anyone left on earth.